Anne Waldman is one of the poets of what was called “Beat Generation”. Friend, in particular, of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Waldman was the youngest of the group. Born in Millville, New Jersey, she moves in MacDougal Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, when she was very small.
It was the sixties, the circle of young poets was wide and very creative, but she immediately tried to get into the circle of the “older” poets as Allen Ginsberg, the father of the Beat Generation, who once called her, his “spiritual wife”.
Anne Waldman wrote a poem for the Kurdish political prisoners on hunger strike since 12 September. We publish the poem here.
Mother Tongue
for the Kurdish political prisoners who are on a hunger strike, November 2012
When they rip out your Mother Tongue
They rip our the heart
For the tongue speaks from the heart against oppression
Against coercion
Against propaganda
Against death
Against sorrow
When they rip out the Mother Tongue
You’re like a child lost in the darkness
May the child always speak and understand its primordial sound
Its power, its infection, its wit, its wisdom, its luminous history
And grow in this
May the child not be in perpetual exile
May the weak be defended in the language of their own psyche
May all rights be respected, and the leaders who struggle
Never cease speaking in the language that moves mountains
That moves the spirit
That attests to the love and beauty of a people, strong in their heritage
This inalienable right, what they are born with, a cosmology, a poetry
Birthed in mother’s milk….
Anne Waldman